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0:03
so it's a huge pleasure for me to welcome our distinguished guest this evening on behalf of the program committee and all our history of science society members assembled here I want to say how very honored we are to focus all in that that you agreed to deliver the Society's distinguished lecture for 2017 professor sverker Sahlin is professor of environmental history at the Royal Institute of Technology in in Stockholm and a co-founder of the environmental
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humanities lab or laboratory which is an initiative of the division of history of science technology and the environment which is also at the RIT in Stockholm he's one of the most and I actually would say the most influential commentator in Scandinavia on environmental policy and climate change and a leading participant in what he is calling and what we will call in conjunction with him the environmental term in the humanities and the social
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sciences he's probably best known to us as a pioneer in drawing attention to the historiography of the Arctic and for his scholarship on the geophysical field sciences especially Glaciology, environmental sustainability, politics and governance and I am longing for him to explain the image that we have shown here at some points. Swaggart is an acclaimed public intellectual in Scandinavia a critic and writer of literary nonfiction and essays his most
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recent book was on the Anthropocene and he's won many prestigious prizes including the August Strindberg Prize for his two volume history of European science and ideas 1492 to 1918 that's a heck of a stretch to cover and he's held visiting positions in Berkeley, Cambridge UK, Princeton, Cape Town, Oslo, and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and he's currently director of a center of excellence. It's called a North Fork center of excellence
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for resource extraction and sustainable Arctic communities which he leads with 15 partner institutions drawn from the universities, museums, and other Institute's from seven countries. H is work to those who invited him and I do urge you to address it if you don't already know it, his work is truly compelling including studies on the emergence of environmental prediction, the strategic and technological value of the circumpolar north, the impact of the
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International polar year in 2007, and postcolonial pressures on indigenous communities all of which and more are reflected in the many advisory boards and special projects that he leads or participates in. He's had a long-term interest in the formation, the both historical and present-day formation, of environmental expertise how people come to believe that there is expertise which we know is an issue today or what could be called the roles and functions of
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knowledge in environmentally informed modern societies and he also serves as a policy analyst and advisor to government. So that's astonishing and we are deeply impressed by what you have to think and I just want to mention to our audience among smokers books particularly on northern themes there's narrating the Arctic there are North... a book called North escapes and science geopolitics and culture in the polar region he's recently working on a
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project that tracks how Arctic climate change travels through media and politics. So we could have no better guide to the troubling themes of climate change and the geopolitics of the circumpolar north than our distinguished lecturer tonight. When we first corresponded about the invitation I promised him an audience deeply appreciative of environmental matters so don't let me down. It's a real pleasure to welcome professor Sverker Sörlin to
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deliver the 2017 history of Science Society Distinguished Lecture: Greening the Great White Encounters of Knowledge and Environment and the Northern Turn in the History of Science. Please. (Applause) well thank you very much I will have to say a few words myself as well after this long introduction some of your things you mentioned I've almost forgotten. The...the image I promised to say a couple of words about that. Actually I use it
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often as a kind of an icon for for our division at the Royal Institute in Stockholm because it's so unexpected for historians to work in the field and also in this particular kind of field which is actually Naples where we have some studies of waste management there's lots of garbage there and there's lots of mafia and it's not me in the uniform I can tell you. Dear fellow historians over the last couple of years I've felt more and more as if my work on history is
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turned into a kind of defence work--a protection of virtues and principles as if I realized I held a kind of secret like the members of that lonely crowd in Farenheit 451 who'd gather among the trees to mumble texts they learn by heart because all the books they owned and kept and loved were burned. I think no not so much about single facts or news that have been faked although that is disheartening enough, I'm talking about the deeper undermining of reason and
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sheer decency there's ongoing and sadly linked to power. That is I believe why our work is if possible, even more important now than it was ever before I need to say no more you know already what I'm thinking about.. the question is how can we take that mission on? How could we do more without compromising what we already do and have learned to do well? and that is why really I would like to move north for this talk because I think there is something that we can
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see perhaps more clearly there but let me before we move just add that on a similar occasion as this one in back in 2010 at the American Society for environmental history meeting in Portland, Oregon that year, the dinner speech was given by the respected cartoonist Jack Ohman of The Oregonian later a Pulitzer Prize winner with a Sacramento Bee. This is one of his images. He told us that half of his colleagues across the US had lost their jobs and
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that many newspapers were closing down still he managed to crack some jokes very sourly but they were very good. A public sphere without cartoonists means that citizens have lost one of their sensory tools with which they make sense of their time and place. Back home I wrote a very sad column about it in my own paper the Stockholm Daily Dagens Nyheter, there still still I couldn't have dreamed about the public sphere would become in just seven years. In
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distinction from cartoonists most of us still have jobs although we are under hot pressure in many countries and by the US Congress whenever they discuss budgets to the NSF and NIH and in many ways I think we have to start seeing ourselves that also as cartoonists as belonging in the community of friction makers and sense makers. My take on the ongoing northern turn in the...in the humanities, is that the north is a good place to address questions of
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fundamental importance and I mean both for the world we live in and for the writing of history some of the largest issues today are to do with scales and agency. We share the value that history should be loyal to agency of people but we can also see how history increasingly plays out at scales and with ramifications that move far beyond our ordinary archival bandwidth of observation. There is a nervousness around these issues debates are raging,
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manifestos written and rebutted, the northern turn happens I think because as if by a subterranean impulse we have realized that things are visible in the north that could help us sort these issues and not just there but anywhere on the globe and we also sense that in our time we really should have something to say about the large issues. Cognitive science is mapping the brain in super projects. Resilience science is taking on global
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sustainability. Economists are, I hope, finally starting their inevitable breakup from the neoclassical paradigm along with our 20 list care for patterns of detail, we should as historians also respond to the hunger and thirst for meaningful narratives that could assist our troubled navigation. So the northern turn reflects I believe a much deeper longing in our profession to do more. Greening that.. the great white may seem an awkwardly ambiguous and strange title
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though. Green is good of course, but is it good if the white goes away as we know is what happens--- ice and snow are melting but it's also true that environmental protection has never been more active. Enormous areas of land are turned into reserves. Here is a map of the situation in Svalbard in Greenland and particularly the Svalbard image speaks miles I think. The situation in Russia is similar down on the right hand side, It's not a very good map though, where among
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the 101 nature reserves or Zappo veneks several in the north have been created in the last 25 years among those, the great Arctic reserve in the Krasnoyarsk region, according to Russian sources, the largest reserve of Russia and Eurasia as well as one of the largest in the world covering 42000 square kilometers the size of the Kingdom of Denmark .Alaska too has massive reserves next door to the North Slope oil fields. Canada same thing, and not on the map
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though but in my own Sweden by far the largest parks and reserves are in the north. In fact a research project in my own department at kth is entitled 'The Greening of the Poles' led by Peter Roberts our colleague. so as you hear like so many good things my title is stolen. It's also stolen from a Canadian volume 'Rethinking the Great White North' It's subtitle contains the words "race" and "whiteness" it links science with
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color in an interesting way in one of the chapters Stephen Bocking argues that whiteness and I quote "maintains an analogical relationship with science" end of quote. He talks of and I quote again "a neglect of the specific contexts of racialization including scientific institutions and disciplines" end quote and he says this after a careful analysis of both nature conservation and anthropology and other fields. Catriona Sandilands in the same volume studies
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the ecologization of national parks and observes what she calls an erasure of human presence from these areas. Go greening can be just another version of whitening of nature-- an imprint of the scientific southern culture on the north and its populations so by this act of linking to color and environment in my title I wanted to say something that I believe is central to the ongoing northern turn in in their history of science and related fields
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and I will give you some evidence of this turn in a moment namely that it is also an act of reinterpretation of the kind of work that science does in the north and elsewhere. Science is no longer that beacon of truth and technology advancing in what explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson once called 'The North Ward Course of Empire' volume from 1922 . In an unforgettable moment of climate determinism where even civilization whitened and elevated as it pressed on toward lower mean temperatures and as
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you may note on the top end of that curve we find his own and native Winnipeg of course as the epitome of the human Enterprise on earth this curve is so very cool I never give a talk without it I can tell you. The northern curves today are very different reminding us rather of our various sins and shortcomings foreboding in their icy imprints what Torontonian Jane Jacobs in the title of her last book in 2004 prophetically called the Dark Age Ahead.
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Arctic sea routes are quite simply less utopian now than they were in Steffanson's days. Now a story that highlights how ice precisely made it to the era of our current anxieties flared up in American and world media in the spring of 2016. It was sparked off by an article in the top-rated journal progress in historical geography on feminist Glaciology by a group of historians at the University of Oregon and I would like to remind you
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that I am NOT a spokesperson of Oregon it just happens to pop up the second time in my talk here and even in Sweden as they say in this country and otherwise widely respected actually not in this country I meant the United States but it's so easy to be a little bit confused when you travel for... so I start again even in Sweden an otherwise widely respected columnist and author repeated the climate denialist slander about this piece and what the twittering
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right conceived as NSF's senseless funding of it. What cribbed her this columnist I think was the rendering of ice the most universal substance of all water in its most elevated places in high mountains and at the poles that this element of sheer purity had politics. Ice is physics - free of opinion and I think her position she didn't know how to pop these things I'm sure, but still her position confirms Stephen Hawking's analysis that we just heard
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Glaciology must remain white and in crafting a response to her in the Dagens Nyheter, I read a book by the Argentinian political scientist Jorge Daniel Taillant, you see it here 'Glaciers: The Politics of Ice' from 2015 based on his UC Berkeley PhD. The company Barrick Gold's wanted to mine in the Andes and use dynamite and soot for melting, to clear off the glaciers that hindered them from reaching the treasures below --the gold. The issue was brought to the
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Argentinian Parliament and a law actually to protect the glaciers was indeed passed in 2010 and in fact a similar law existed already in France- the law de Montaigne from 1985 and in Italy, glaciers are a Commons under the Water Legislation since 1921. Now as Mark Kerry the leader of the Oregon team and others have demonstrated in their research on the Andes on Himalaya and other regions, fresh water supplies from glaciers are important for
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small mountain communities but also for big things like watering of rivers across the Northern Indian subcontinent much of the work to take care of water for drinking, washing, household animals, is carried out precisely by women. Needless to say this hated peace became the most read and cited article in progress of human geography last year. What is noteworthy in this story is how quickly a seemingly small subject- study of glaciers- turned into a prairie
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fire of argument on climate change, gender and power relations, the use and abuse of science and science funding, post-colonial legacies, and of course the future of the planet and that last thing said without irony. The critics were simply terribly uninformed of the ways Glaciology has changed. It is now so much more here striding up the hill is Ninis Rosqvist, a Stockholm University geographer and leader of the Tarfala Research Station which holds the world's
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longest record of glacial data from 1946 one year older than that of Juneau ice shield in Alaska. The photographic documentation of the glacial retreat in this region goes back to 1910 and is now part of a completely instrumented glacier and these pictures of long-term environmental change are I think the cryosphere versions of Keeling's Mionaloa record of atmospheric co2 the iconic curve that you saw a moment ago and one day Ninis said to herself isn't
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it strange that we have collected all these data over all these years and never thought of what it might mean to the people who live here. So she engaged and involved the local Sami in the region in data collection and in actually setting research agenda I happen to know this because we worked fairly closely together Nina's and I over several years and she is now a national celebrity on TV with her work and and cited in the news media and wins prizes
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for her innovative research. On the other hand the Sami were always partners since the 1940s when they started working for the station then in construction as builders and maintenance workers... and maintenance workers in many dimensions and even earlier they served as mountain guides to scientists in the tradition of loyal and trustworthy field assistants that Jane Kamerini brought out so well in her Osiris paper in the 90s on Wallis and Olli in the Malay Archipelago. I
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explored this subject in my own work with further examples from Glaciology in Greenland and Iceland where the founder of the Tarfala Station, Stockholm geographer Hans Allman very skillfully collaborated with local residents in Greenland and in Iceland. I have a couple examples here from Iceland. So early climate change knowledge was co-produced in the field by Sami Inuit and Icelanders. Hans Ahlmann was one of the major players of glaciology in the
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first half of the 20th century. He even had his own very special theory of global warming which he called polar warming he thought climate change happened but only at the poles and for reasons he couldn't really explain but he wanted to research further through careful measurements of the retreat of glacial circumpolar areas and in Antarctica for which he organized a famous Norwegian British Swedish expedition the NBS X in 1949 to 1950 -
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it included participants from South Africa and the United States and has proven by later research to be a far more political undertaking actually than its own self portrayal suggested. Ahlmann turned out to be a political animal himself finishing his career as the Swedish ambassador to Oslo after having demonstrated his capabilities as a science diplomat in bringing no less than two exiled Scandinavian scientists back from the US where they had played
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seminal roles during the war years. Harald Ulrich Sverdrup who headed Scripps Institution of Oceanography for more than a decade, finally gave in to his friends' wooing and returned to set up the Norwegian Polar Institute in 1948 under Havald Langer as foreign minister who incidentally had served as an assistant during Ahlmann's work on Norwegian glaciers a couple of decades earlier and on the small image you can see that
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we're Sverdrup is trying to catch up with his Swedish friend Ahlmann during field work in Svalbard on skis is an unusual situation, usually the Norwegians are ahead. The year before, in 1947, Carl-Gustaf Rossby was persuaded by Ahlmann to leave the Institute of meteorology at the University of Chicago to set up shop in Stockholm while maintaining close ties with Chicago, Woods Hole, and the Princeton Computer Project. This may seem a side story
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most of which is well covered already by Christine Harper, Paul Edwards, and Jim Fleming, but it may be added I think that under Rossby, Stockholm quickly rose to global significance in what would soon turn into computer-based climate change science with very strong bearings on the North. The Scandinavians got interest in the co2 hypothesis and Rossby, tireless broker, and man of ideas, made his collaborators organize an early Scandinavians co2 measurement network.
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While at the same time they also beat the Americans in producing the first American weather predictions in 1955 with a computer built well at KTH in Stockholm my own institution. The leader on the workshop floor of these exercises was Rossby's graduate student, Burt Pauline who thirty years later, would become the founding president of the IPCC probably known to many of you here and during their years together in the 50s, Rossby and Pauline served as
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president and secretary respectively of the Swedish Committee for the International Geophysical Year with very much activities near the poles in 1957-58. This Stockholm lineage goes deep when Rossby left stockholm for the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1924, he was simply fed up with his counterpart in Stockholm. He did so with a letter from ... from this man Svante Arrhenius who in 1896 had made the first calculation of global warming through atmospheric co2 not because he
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believed in any human forcing of climate for at least hundreds of years but because it was interested in how ice ages could form and at the tail end of the same lineage we find another Nobel Laureate, Paul Crutzen, who in 1958 came with his young wife from the Netherlands to the small Swedish city of Gävle, fear you haven't heard of Gävle, but it's a very small city, because it found a job there as a construction engineer he was building bridges but he had barely
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arrived in Gävle when he saw an ad for a job as a programmer at Stockholm University he applied and he got hired his supervisor turned out to be bad Pauline and kurtsyn somehow couldn't help getting interested in atmospheric problems like ozone and ended up winning the prize in chemistry a subject he had no degree in and a reason this rambling stock on tail actually is not a side story is that Christian is not credited with the invention of the concept of the
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in prophecy a word I assume that you have heard and a word that is central actually for me in my reading of the northern turn only that it wasn't just Christians invention when historians started to learn about this new concept which was very early in to eat in fact John McNeil at Georgetown University was co-authoring articles with Christian and other Earth System scientists more than a decade ago so when this was known we did what historians usually do we
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historic iced it as Clarins blackened the Berkeley geographer had started doing already in the nineteen 50s and the outcome of that work I may say was that many very many had talked about an era of human hegemonic agency on the planetary scale for a long time but perhaps more importantly than finding the roots of the concept we also found that there was another way of telling the history of science informed by this concept since say the days of
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Leo names and theories ideas and elements like ice and snow and places like the Arctic that had been at the margin far trusted canon were now moving closer to center stage almond for sure is among those sea ice measuring Russian oceanographers such as Zubov and Connie Povich or indeed of Vladimir Vernadsky with his biosphere concept or a guy Stewart Callendar the British steam engineer who ventured in 1938 to propose human burning of fossil fuels as the
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chief driver of a global warming now considered a landmark article but who has written was written off for many years as an amateur actually Allman called him so himself backed by no institution or academic prestige calendar had worked on spare time using fragile data now under the surface a new storyline has been forming that we can now see more clearly and all through it had this very special relation to the North to ice to the great white and at
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least potentially to the greening of it which is the moment to now return to this image and we saw before and the man in the middle with a little beard his name is Antoni Dabra Wolski nothing in his timid of us reveals it but he was a passionate polish naturalist with a lifelong love affair with ice and snow that's why is in this picture he had been jailed and sent to caucuses for his rebellious politics joined later the Belgian Belgian the Gallic
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expedition to Antarctica in the last couple of years of the 1900s 1800 and loved every minute of the dark and the cold when it could do pioneering work on crystallography ice crystallography he fled his country again during the first world war to Stockholm actually where he worked away on his major 900-page tome the natural history of ice published in Polish in which he launched the concept cryosphere from the greek cryos cold and that was in 1923 in the following years
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Dabra Walski just like calendar encountered the solidifying Anglo Scandinavian establishment of Glaciology which I must say was not very interested in his new concept and later in the first issue of the new journal of Glacia lacy ology after the war in 1947 Jarod Seligman famous for his 1936 book snow structures and ski fields said of his Polish colleague that his work was commendable but that cryosphere had been in no starter glaciologists didn't cry
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or at least they didn't want to have a word that made him think about it almond otherwise an anxious person in the field we have many evidence of that took the same position no cryosphere no cry it took until the satellites came up in the early 1970s for cryosphere to make it and do a decisive breakthrough when the white could be visualized from above and proved to be really really grand a quarter of the northern hemisphere in
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January so some big words here biosphere cryosphere and propo scene can be stitched together into a story of ice and snow and environmental change that connect a number of points to some of the most major concerns of our time and we do well to keep them alive when we the past so as you can hear I'm blasphemous enough to argue that we should indeed allow ourselves to engage history backwards sometimes we should use the anxieties and the Roth's a
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righteous effect in the moment of disaster to return to the history we thought we knew and revisit it and always find a new history there that has a reason that he told boundaries is yet another important word on that level and a category in its own right used in a quasi Malthusian fashion in the limits to growth report in 1972 and returning forcefully but with a totally different logic in the 2009 nature article on planetary boundaries the illustration is
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from that piece I was actually one of the 29 co-authors most of the others were about system scientists it was a very special experience indeed not least at 24 hours of its making the news around the world in September 2009 I happened to be in Santa Barbara that day with several other of the authors for a meeting and I as the others made various statements over the email and all of a sudden I saw my name popping up on the screen in Mother Jones that magazine I
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always admired it was literally only minutes after I had said these words on my type keypad that was out there without knowing that I would and it was also terrifying terrifying experience of the forces that are at play in the globalization of science communication so mixed feelings but my point is that this Earth System science way of translating planetary data into a set of boundaries in this case for ozone ocean acidification biodiversity atmospheric
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co2 9 in total that this act is also an technology an environment technology producing the environment as a social and historical category in a process that has been ongoing throughout the period of modern environment and I'm just a theory Singh this concept environment technologies in work I do with my close colleague Nina forms back in Stockholm anyway my story here as a background from a forthcoming book with Johns Hopkins University Press
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co-author with two close colleagues Paul ward in Cambridge and Libby Robin at Anu it is actually a conceptual history of the environment itself an old word very old word whose meaning changed after the Second World War an event I think of very great significance and our symbolic year of choice for that transition was 1948 the year of two rallying out cries using the concept in the modern sense by ecologist William fucked and conservationist Fairfield Osborn was
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also the year of peak oil presented here graphically in an apocalyptic book by physicist Harrison Brown a few years later it was also the year of Norbert wieners cybernetics and if you read the book you can go on and find more evidence for 1948 I stopped here we found that the concept of environment was doing a fabulous work of integration across a range of science fields making connections between people as different as Jevons latke Vernadsky dobrovolsky
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that I just mentioned Wiener Julian Huxley and some also of the Arctic scientists we had in fact collected much of the evidence in a previous volume of sources with Yale providing what we call the genealogy of our current Earth System science but it's equally important to see how much of this integrative work on environment was carried out not in the lab or not in the field but in a growing number of conferences and in diplomatic contexts
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it was negotiated it was talked about it was talked into being chief of those became much later the UN Stockholm conference on the human environment in 1972 but long before that prepared in 1948 the UNESCO meetings at Lake had proven an early arena for the concept crafting with which gathered the right people at the right time other than key meetings followed in Princeton in 1955 assembling again many of the big names in the geosciences like
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called Sauer Charles don't wait but also Lewis Mumford of course who was everywhere more meetings were held as the environment grew as an issue of importance in the United States with a report to the president in 1965 already featuring climate change as a serious issue now from so simple a beginning became communities of knowledge that gathered around this concept as one that made work for them that they could use both internally in their sciences and externally in working with the
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non-academic world of policy and solutions so environment was an extremely useful concept above all in this work I think we understood much better why environment became arguably arguably one of the key concepts of the previous century up there with democracy and economic growth and again no irony at all and this is when we can return again to the greening and the white it is an important dimension of the environment in the 1950s that it was very much used by the US military I've learned from
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some of my American colleagues over the years Rondo Jake Hamlin that the environment was also the three-dimensional space of warfare as in this 1946 Time magazine illustration in addition environment was also the immediate sphere of action surrounding the soldier or the pilot I'm among those lucky ones who have spent time in the archives of the Harvard fatigue laboratory the collections of the period 1927 through 1947 the lab was dismantled
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in 47 just as the conceptual shift that I mentioned occurred it was still about environment shaping man the soldier not the other way around but when the environment expanded to be everything from the sea floor to the stratosphere it became something else and the terraforming or cryo forming of the Arctic started taking place the US military get the Tula station in northwestern Greenland with camp century in the ice sheet nearby book that is
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just out by Henry Nielsen and Christian wietfeldt at Oris University Denmark explores the full detail of the bizarre world of snow and ice engineering at the same time it can't be separated from the multinational work on ice core drilling at the tarfful a station in Sweden that I mentioned before there was no planning for a third world war but Atlas Copco the Swedish technology giant drilled a hole into the glacier purely for research purposes of course
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only at the Kirin AA geophysical Observatory nearby were high politics allowed to enter with the US military paying almost half of their budget for Sputnik observations and the monitoring of Soviet nukes testing in the special kind of distributed research strategy that John kriegie elucidated in his 2006 book on American hegemony and the post-war reconstruction of science in Europe actually a clear-cut example of that happening there in the Swedish north thar fella had another politics they had
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climate politics an anthropogenic climate change as anthropogenic climate change became the scientific norm from the 1970s the tarfful a community of scientists were still steadfastly on their natural variability hypothesis in the spirit of Allman who remained largely on the same position when he died in 1974 as when he rejected calendar several decades earlier or as Robert Millikan when he wrote in his 1930s book alleged sins of science that
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we mere humans shouldn't be anxious but and I quote him sleep in peace with the consciousness that the creator has put some foolproof elements into his handiwork and that man is powerless to do it any Titanic physical damage here with the Alberta tar sands in the background just to illustrate why we can't agree with Milliken today for the people who once lived at Tula and in Northwest Green and I were forcefully moved by the Americans
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to connect some 30 miles further north it was especially hard to agree with Milliken if they ever thought about that their community of 700 in the northernmost human settlement in the world has been studied carefully by Danish anthropologist kissed and Astrup over many years has troops work has nothing nostalgic to it it is a very modernist story of how people keep adapting to change and how they are as connected to the worldwide web here as
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anywhere else and they share the same concerns as all the rest of us but it is also a story of how much more cumbersome life has become because of climate change on the edge of time as she calls it also the title that Marvis book you see on the right hand side of uncertainty and danger on weaker and more erratic Isis with shorter hunting seasons less travel which means less conviviality a less friendly arctic to live in during my years as president of
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the Swedish Committee for the 4th international polar year a decade ago indeed mimicking the mission of Ross P and bullying a half century earlier a spooky thing for historian I can tell you I got the opportunity to get deeper into the full range of research going on in what had always been the white and pure but was now increasingly becoming dirty and impacted as by new mines and prospecting for oil and gas I was impressed during those years to learn
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how much good an important work that was carried out by Arctic humanities and social science scholars who in fact made up 1/3 of the entire research effort during ipy compared to zero zero percent in the igy fifty years earlier that was a pure science undertaking historians were also around in the ipy piling up an ever larger body of work that has kept growing since multiplying the previous singular contributions by traveler and a
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very small handful of other Arctic historians before the 2000s but now this change has changed rapidly the issue agenda of the northern turn has helped catalyze new research practices among historians as well I think of myself and my closest collaborators over the last decade not as odd and exceptional as we sometimes go to the field but rather as templates of responsible scholars in this era of hopeful sadness and necessary defense work but disturbingly
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climate change is not only an impetus for people like ourselves but also to the forces that wanted to increase resource exploitation Trump is now reopening the fossil fuel extraction in Alaska that Obama reduced Putin certainly never even reduced them little Norway doesn't seem very keen to let fossil fuels stay underground in the Arctic and only God knows the mind of Justin Trudeau at times he doesn't seem to know himself I think but I still gave
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him the benefit of the doubt a true interdisciplinary teacher geographer engineer fighter a da Vinci kind of CV maybe also left-handed I don't know that is also why I am suspicious of the greening that is mostly about nature reserves created as boundary zones to protect the extraction and of one of my main preoccupations right now as you heard is a major center of excellence on extractive industries and sustainable Arctic communities Rex a key greening is a politics of nature and resources
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science does tremendous work in the Arctic but also is serving roles in what we may call green washing a bit like Canada the country that had too much geography in premier Mackenzie Kings famous statement to the British Parliament in 1936 we can say about the entire Arctic region that it is it still has too little history and that I mean as written history certainly no less in other respects I got an immediate sense of the problem
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as I was recently asked to write the Arctic oceans chapter for the Cambridge oceanic histories that is just about to appear I accepted assuming there wasn't much to say but precisely that proved to be the towering challenge to write about this vast great white and it's human relations four million inhabitants five percent of the globe how could it be done and why is it now being done with such newfound energy my answer to this question is about agency an
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extraordinary agency that must think that we that must be increasingly recognized as historical but also about traditional agency and let me spend my remaining minutes on agency and how the northern turn is helping us we articulate it in our time agency was always an issue certainly with so few inhabitants in this vast space so when we stopped doing Arctic science history as one goddamn expedition after the other we looked for other manifestations
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of agency on the ground typically of the presence of state and science nature reserves settlements infrastructures encounters with indigenous knowledge and performative installations or octants if you want to use that word such as precisely research stations or just scattered surveyors this work has built let's admit that a powerful narrative and make science itself an actor often serving the national interest and it proved significant as a
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research line that some of us pursued for a good couple of decades linking science to the wider history of geopolitics these two publications that I just showed you here the previous book here and this fairly recent article here from 2002 and 2014 our results of that still productive line of northern history but it is already I think being superseded now by trajectories of new work dressing agency in new ways and this is probably about perspective
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seeing in the relatively small Arctic region the fate in a sense of the entire world linking agencies inside the region with those elsewhere some work does that and I here again show you a number of recent books that deal with these issues hysterics work already mention Julie Crick shanks on cultural encounters around glaciers in the 18th century Pacific Northwest Sheila Grant's work in Canada on forced relocations and issues of justice these are Piper's on the use of science by
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mining companies to evade nature protection in subarctic Canada Paul Joseph sands work on Russian Arctic science to mention a few or andrew stools on the deconstruction of the superficial so-called new Arctic narratives published only last year these books I think together speak to cultural social and environmental issues anywhere although they focus on the Arctic now let me return to stools and freezing the Arctic which says it in the
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very title Arctic history used to be Exceptionalist of a frozen place whereas it were things happen differently or not at all when in fact they do happen it always happened there at the bottom the same history as everywhere else with lots of human agency in fur trading in reindeer herding in military planning these are stories we are familiar with from wherever cultural encounters take place so students work I think is an
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imaginative amalgamation of histories of politics Authority indigenous knowledge science environment on the Canada Alaska border it's all about method about ethics his is an intimate history based also on being there listening an informant tells them and I quote don't bring back a hollow story end quote and still takes this to heart you should bring something back that is of use to the community now if stool is on the right track here
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and he surely is how could we then explain the northern turn if what we need is to D exceptional eyes the north and right in a sense of normal history of agency and power is the new history of the new north just a fad that he argues but not quite I think while I very much agree with Andy's public history position I think we have to separate the methodological response what stool calls a transnational environmental history of science which is spot on we must separate that from the reasons
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for the northern turn that I believe are even wider and deeper and even more thrilling and we must consider both I think and do more so let me here invoke the word Weltanschauung and for a third time this evening without irony because I would argue what really makes it possible to conceive of a northern turn is a historiography that will take us further in our ambitions of scaling and connecting different kinds of histories and to identify in this work
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of human human agency of our time and day that also appears on other levels adding to but not reducing the so to speak ordinary agencies that still rightly talks about and we make all these extraordinary agencies agencies that we have as a global collective however divided these agencies are visible on geological scales perhaps this is why so many people visit Iceland these days after the financial meltdown and the arrival of the improper scene
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Icelandic tourism is up 400% in a decade it's an enigma like a new religion the president of Iceland is our colleague he's an historian and he is concerned he gave a talk in Leeds recently that I heard when he presented himself as roaming the slopes of his volcanoes asking the tourists worried questions and observing in despair endless queues to under sized filled toilets when someone asked him who he was he replied I'm the president of this country yeah
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it was quite as funny in Leeds I must tell you Iceland's allure is about geo power the geo power of humanity hence this pilgrimage I think this is my theory of Icelandic tourism that you'll get this pilgrimage to the small country of deep time it's a country small country of deep time of a jewel verne world of connections I may be wrong of course but Iceland seems to offer this strange sense of belonging to an emerging geo humanity one may think of laxness novel Christianity under the
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glacier if you didn't read it do miracles come and go like disasters like streetcars almost in Iceland but our interpretive schemes are changing it's no longer Christianity under the glacier there is something else there may be something about new mega narratives locating human agency even in the Geo stories and we see that very clearly I think in the Arctic without these narratives no northern term they are now becoming part of what
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we call history actually to invoke John dawn know history is an island they are part of the main and even some of the very big issues that we didn't deal with before we are now dealing with as history these narratives are making the planet graspable as with sabina healers masterful analysis of spaceship earth and biosphere to published a couple of years ago this is more than globalization it is the stitching together of the separate spheres the
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geosphere the atmosphere the biosphere the cryosphere into this limited planet and that's why you need these concepts from the 20th century largely jerome ASCO the chicago anthropologist talked about it as the age of fallout here depicted in an early presentation of the spread of radionuclides for the mike and bravo tests planet is becoming graspable to the right is a rendering of the so called teleconnections of only last year the super earth systems that we humans
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now affect connecting the poles and the monsoons at least if we are to believe the earth system scientists I have no personal opinion on this and just read the scientific journals so this is Anthropocene iconography it spans our current age it has become terribly visible in the Arctic it is the subterranean impulse again and this time we feel it in the humanities this is extraordinary agency human intentionality on the species scale
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making its impact on the planetary so far without a functional politics instead producing madmen and fear so is the history that lies in stocked waiting for us to theorize and research as we pursue our northern turn and good for us there were always scientists around in all possible roles in these processes as protagonists but also as the storytellers where the Earth System science community is among the most perceptive these days so I will end this talk on one of my favorite ideas bad
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pedagogy I should of course have started with it but it's basically about the various modes and arenas of narration or jars if you like where this new veldt are showering is taking place I don't have time for a full investigation here but let me just loo to a few things it's big science storytelling in popular culture for example films movies inconvenient truths it's big history David Christian style it's new mega-projects linking archeology and
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climate science like I hope the acronym it's a new human Earth history emerging and it's part of our job to engaging writing it not necessarily or not even primarily by doing the job of the earth science storytellers they do their job very well themselves by on their own but by understanding what they are up to how they pursue their groundbreaking project and this shouldn't be new to us we belong there not least because historians of science will always in a
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sense provide the ultimate scaling which is telling the story of how all these components work together forming the Nouvelle - I like certain and Kure and others did before us but we will of course do it differently we can no longer just look from the outside on the rotating spheres the agency I'm talking about is acting now it in its impacts are imminent we are responsible we are vulnerable together which i think is why we aspire to do more thank you
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